CASIUS PLUNGED through the dense foliage, sweating bare chested, with mud plastered up his legs and streaking his chest, his black shorts now clinging wet and torn down the right thigh. He’d covered forty miles in the twenty-four hours since entering the jungle, tracking by the sun during the day and by the stars at night. He’d slept once, eight hours earlier. His father would have been proud of him.

But then his father was dead.

Casius halted at the edge of a twenty-foot swath cut from the forest floor, surprised to see the wide scar so deep in the jungle. The canopy above had survived and now grew together, creating the appearance of a large tunnel through the underbrush.

He pulled out a wrinkled topographical map. The compound lay ten miles to the east, in the direction of this wide overgrown path. Casius crossed into the jungle and resumed his jog.

Since his departure from the city, he’d eaten only papaya and yie palm cut on the run, but hunger pains now slowed his progress. Without a bow and arrow, killing a heron or a monkey would be difficult, but he needed the protein.

Ten minutes later he spotted the root that would give him red meat. Casius took his knife from his belt, cut deep into a twisted mamucori vine, and let the poisonous sap run over his blade. Under normal conditions the Indians dissolved the poison in boiling water, which would evaporate from any dipped surface, leaving only deadly residue. But he had neither the time nor the fire necessary for the application.

Finding the howler monkeys was like finding a traffic light in the city. Approaching them undetected wasn’t nearly as simple. The small animals had an uncanny sense of danger. Casius slipped behind a tree and eyed a group of five or six howlers shaking branches fifty meters away, high in a Skilter tree. He slid into the open and crept toward them. The approach was painstakingly slow, and for fifteen full minutes he inched forward, until he came to rest behind a large palm. Four monkeys now sat chattering unsuspecting on the end of a branch that hung low, no more than twenty meters from his position. Casius slipped from behind the tree and hurled his knife into the group.

They scattered in terror as the knife flipped toward them. The blade clanged into the branches, grazing one of the monkeys. It was two minutes before the poison reached the monkey’s nervous system and sent it plummeting from its perch high in the tree, unconscious. He picked it up, snapped its neck with a quick twist, and resumed his push south. The poison would be harmless to him, and the meat would replenish his depleted energy. He had always preferred meat cooked but he had learned to eat it however it came. Today a fire was out of the question, so the meat would remain raw.